2021 was a momentous year for Bidstack.
Landing two transformational deals at the end of the year has substantiated our strategy and given the business clarity of focus and a supportive partner to grow with.
Securing a two-year deal worth $30 million of guaranteed revenue for our media business driven by a third party sales team allows the Company to now turn its attention to multiple other use-cases for our software.
The business has gone from generating £140k revenue from test spends in 2019 to signing a minimum c.£21m ($30 million) revenue deal over two years in 2021. The market is becoming more established from a media-buying perspective.
Throughout 2021, there was an increased focus on the quality of Bidstack revenues, which is reflected in our gross margin expansion delivered through advertising campaigns, which is now consistently above 30%. Within our media business, we’ve looked to deliver campaigns across a diversified portfolio of titles, ranging from high definition photo-real simulations to casual games. The growing breadth, depth and scale of our inventory captures a wider addressable audience.
The Internet Advertising Bureau and Media Rating Council are pushing towards in-gameplay advertising becoming fully standardised in 2022, which will see our industry fully recognised, for the first time.
The Directors expect that always-on ‘open marketplace deals’ will deliver a revenue step-change in our industry and for our publishers looking for innovative monetisation solutions. This wouldn’t be possible without the hard work our commercial and product teams have put into educating the advertising and video gaming communities over the last three years.
We’ve taken a look at how the business and our industry could look in 2025 and beyond. We are in ongoing conversations surrounding granting access to our platform for non-media sales use, which leans heavily into the unique insight our business has, from a data perspective, on the video gaming landscape.
The outcome of current technical development work is expected to result in our business soon having access to software-as-a-service revenue which is over and above our media-sales revenues. Over time this is intended to diversify Bidstack’s exposure away from any single revenue stream.
Active cost management has been a focus, to ensure we are broadly in line with market expectations, whilst protecting longer-term shareholder value by investing appropriately in a megatrend market. We enter 2022 in a well capitalised position.
Forecasting has always been a challenge for a company where the infancy of our market has meant providing certainty over revenue trajectory has been difficult. However, the deals we concluded before the end of 2021, enable the Company to plan with a greater deal of accuracy than has been possible before.
We are clear from the deals we have won that our software platform offering is at the leading edge of the in-game advertising industry and we believe that, as a business, we are generating revenues from authentic advertising campaigns at a prominent rate.
The market is beginning to mature and the interest in our technology gives us great motivation going into 2022 and beyond.
James.